This is an excerpt from a recent educational article by Onlogic:
Now we get to the heart of the question – why, in many cases, is it advantageous to run AI workloads at the edge instead of relying on the cloud?
To begin with, the edge is where the data is being created. It’s where all the Operational Technology (OT) of a manufacturing plant lives. Sending all of the data to the cloud is expensive. Remember the equivalent data volume of 500,000 movies being generated in a highly automated factory every month? It would be cost prohibitive to send and store all of this data in the cloud. Beyond the cost for sending and storing data, there is the cost for using compute resources in the cloud. The cloud is in strong demand these days, and the cost for computing resources in the cloud is substantial. Conversely, if the data processing is performed at the edge on the hardware the customer owns, the only cost is the cost of the hardware and the cost for operating and maintaining it, which can be further mitigated through the use of the proper industrial hardware.